NASA – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Donald Trump and his 2020 (lack of a) Science Budget

The President’s requested budget for the US Federal government for the fiscal year 2020 has been released and, to put it mildly it’s a punch in the gut to the advancement of science in this country. The good news is that it is the US Congress who actually has the power to pass a budget and the President’s funding request is really just a suggestion. However the proposed budget does illustrate how appropriate funding for science, and the direct relation of science to our nation’s security and prosperity are being lost in the partisan bickering that has become what we call government.

Now the US government, instead of having a single department of science, splits the funding for scientific programs into several different departments. These include some of the government’s best known agencies such as NASA and the National Institute of Health (NIH) along the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Three Federal Agencies most involved in the Advancement of Science (Credit:, NASA, NSF, NIH)

Then there are other agencies which conduct scientific activities in addition to their other work such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In these agencies determining what work can be considered advancing science and what is regulatory or dealing with national defense can be tricky so I’ll examine the two groups separately.

Starting with NASA the chart below shows a breakdown of the proposed 2020 budget. Now I admit the chart has a lot in it and it’s difficult to really understand what going on but remember we are only concerned with the two columns 2019 (this year) and 2020 (the proposed budget) and we’ll look at one line item at a time. By the way the blue lines are major budget areas with the white lines beneath them efforts broken out from the major area above.

President Trump’s Proposed 2020 Budget for NASA (Credit: NASA)

Starting at the top the ‘Deep Space Exploration Systems’ is the Space Launch System (SLS) and other programs for human exploration beyond Earth orbit. Comparing the numbers for 2019, $5.05 billion and 2020, $5.021 Billion, you can see that about $29 million is going to be taken away from this effort. That’s a reduction of only 0.5% so it’s not too bad. Still considering all the delays and budget problems the SLS has had over the last few years adding yet one more difficulty can’t really be a good thing.

The Space Launch System has already been delayed several times by budget concerns. (Credit: Boeing)

Let’s drop down to the line called ‘LEO and Spaceflight Operations’. Now LEO stands for Low Earth Orbit and this line item includes manning and maintaining the International Space Station (ISS) along with getting astronauts back and forth to the ISS. We see that the proposed 2020 funding is $4.285 billion, a reduction of 9.2% from the 2019 funding of $4.639 Billion. That’s a substantial reduction and illustrates NASA’s growing desire to step back from its commitment to the ISS and turn over space efforts in LEO to commercial companies like Boeing, Space X along with others such as Bigelow aerospace.

Continuing down the next blue line we come to the Science line item which includes both interplanetary probes as well as those satellites that are studying the Earth from orbit. The cutbacks here are also very large, from $6.905 Billion in 2019 to only $6.303 Billion in 2020, a reduction of 9.1%. Once again the implication is that the Trump administration, insofar as it cares about space at all, cares only about manned spaceflight.

The Cassini Probe to Saturn is only one of the robotic missions that have taught us so much about our solar system (Credit: NASA)

The Upcoming Psyche Spaceprobe could be delayed or even canceled due to Trump’s Budget Cuts. (Credit: NASA / JPL)

Before moving on to the other departments in our government I’d just like to point out one small line item, STEM engagement. As many of you may know STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and STEM engagement is NASA’s efforts to help promote STEM education in our schools. Obviously the Trump administration doesn’t approve of trying to encourage our young people to aspire to careers in STEM because the entire line item has been cut from the 2020 budget, a 100% reduction!

So now let’s move on to proposed budget for the National Institute of Heath, which is an agency with the Department of Health and Human Services. Now you’d think that with the current problems the US is having with such medical issues as opioid abuse and suicide along with traditional diseases like cancer and heart disease that the NIH would at the very least be receiving a small increase in budget. And let’s not forget that recent statistics have shown that life expectancy in the US is actually going down for the first time in over a hundred years. Obviously there’s a lot of work for our health care professionals to do right now but apparently the Trump Administration doesn’t feel that way. The 2020 proposed budget cuts spending on the NIH by 4.5 billion or 11%.

The National Science Foundation, which funds so much of the pure research carried out in this country also takes a major hit in the proposed budget. The proposed budget is $7.1 Billion in 2020, a decrease of $1 Billion or 12% from 2019. This cutback clearly illustrates the shortsighted ignorance of those to prefer ‘practical’, ‘useful’ science as opposed to basic research without recognizing that ‘practical’ science cannot even begin without the foundation provided by basic research.

Much of the Basic Science carried out in the USA is funded by the National Science Foundation (Credit: Illinois College)

I’ve saved the worst for last, because what the Trump administration has proposed for the Environmental Protection Agency is nothing less than a deliberate abandonment of any and all responsibility for how we treat our planet. The 2020 budget request of $6.1 billion represents fully a 31% cut from the EPA’s funding for 2019.

With all of the pollution we’ve dumping into the Environment only a madman would cut the budget for the EPA! (Credit: Kiwi Report)

This lack of concern for the health of the planet on which we live is very much is keeping with Trump’s attitude we can do whatever we want to the environment without suffering any consequences. The reality is however that every day we see more and more evidence that we are already suffering for our mismanagement of the Earth and the consequences are only going to increase in both magnitude and quantity if we don’t wake up and start behaving responsibly.

And that’s the real danger of the Trump administration’s proposed 2020 budget for science, because without science we won’t have the knowledge we need in order to know how to behave responsibly. After all science is just the Latin word for knowledge.

Trump however has throughout his life always chosen to exploit the ignorance and greed of those around him so the cutbacks in science make perfect sense, to him. For the rest of us however, an America without a commitment to science is an America that has lost its greatness.

New Horizons Space Probe gets Science off to a good start in the year 2019 with a Flyby of the most distant world ever visited.

Just 33 minutes past midnight on January the first here on the US East Coast NASA’s New Horizons space probe made it’s closest approach to the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 better known by it’s unofficial nickname Ultima Thule. The Ultima Thule flyby comes three and a half years after New Horizons hugely successful mission to Pluto back in 2015 and was actually added on to the original Pluto mission because New Horizons was in such good shape that a flyby of Ultima Thule seemed possible.

The New Horizons Space Probe Swept Past Pluto back in 2015 (Credit: NASA)

In fact Ultima Thule was not even discovered until 2014, eight years after New Horizons had been launched back in January of 2006 so the flyby represents the first time that a space probe has visited a world that wasn’t discovered until after the probe was launched.

Ultima Thule is so far away, 6.5 Billion kilometers, that even traveling at the speed of light it wasn’t until 10:30 the next morning that the scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL, which manages the space probe for NASA) received the signals telling them that New Horizons had successfully carried out the mission. At that distance the rate at which New Horizons’ transmitter can send back the data it collected is also very low, only 1 kilobyte per second. In fact it will take 20 months for New Horizons to send all of its discoveries back to Earth.

However, knowing how anxious the public was to see some results the scientists at APL quickly published a rough first image; see below, which showed an obviously bilobed object some 30 km by 15 km. It wasn’t until a press conference the next day (January 2nd and which I just finished watching) that we started getting some real information about just what kind of world Ultima Thule is.

First, Rough Picture of Ultima Thule from New Horizon. (Credit: Sky News)

Looking at the first Hi-Resolution image below it is apparent that Ultima Thule is actually two roughly spherical objects that have come together very gently, with no sign of anything like a collision. The team at APL has decided to name the larger, lower ball Ultima and the smaller upper ball Thule.

First Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule from New Horizons (Credit: APL, NASA)

The physical configuration of Ultima Thule has indicated to APL scientists, led by program manager Alan Stern, to suggest that Ultima Thule formed 4.5 billion years ago exactly as we see it today. Indeed it is thought that back when the solar system was forming there were literally million of small objects very similar to Ultima Thule all the way from where Mercury is now to beyond where Ultima Thule. In the inner solar system those ‘planetoids’ came together to form the planets. Beyond Pluto however the planetoids were so few and the distance between them so great that many remained just as they were, as Ultima Thule is now. The basic idea of how Ultima Thule formed is show in the image below.

Suggested Formation Scheme of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

The first Hi-Res pictures are capable of resolving features on Ultima Thule down to a size of about 150 m but with more data coming in the scientists hope to be able to increase the resolution down to about 40 m or maybe even a little smaller. Nevertheless there are already some features that are clearly seen in the first images, see below. The scientists at APL are especially interest in the ring around where the two lobes meet. By the way the new Hi-Res images have also enabled the scientists to determine that Ultima Thule rotates about once every 15+1 hours.

Features see in Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

Now the Hi-Resolution camera on board New Horizons is strictly black and white but we can produce a colour image of Ultima Thule because the data from a low-resolution colour camera can be used to colourize the Hi-Res picture. The image below illustrates how this is done and it turns out that Ultima Thule is reddish in colour.

How the Scientists Colourize the Hi-Res Image of Ultima Thule (Credit: APL, NASA)

In the days to come we’ll be learning more about Ultima Thule as more and more of the data from New Horizons comes in. The probe itself is of course still going, heading out of the solar system following a path set out by the Pioneer and especially the Voyager space probes. The scientists at APL hope that like the Voyagers New Horizons will continue to send back data for 20 or more years, teaching us even more about what is beyond our solar system. See image below.

Future Course of New Horizons, and other Probes beyond the Solar System (Credit: APL, NASA)

Before I go, since this is my first post of 2019 I’ll like to take just a moment to recapitulate 2018 for Science and Science Fiction. There were 102 published posts in all, that’s nearly two every week. 87 posts dealt with science while 14 dealt with SF and there was one post that dealt with the blog itself.

The visitor statistics for Science and Science Fiction improved steadily throughout 2018, thank you all very much. Starting at a little under 500 visits per day in January by December the number of daily visitors had risen to 1400, an increase of about 280%!!

The number of registered subscribers also rose to a total of 8,952. And the people who come to visit or subscribe live throughout the world. Seriously everyday I get comments from places like China or Germany or Hungary or just about any country you’d care to name.

All I can say is that I appreciate all of you who come to my blog in order to learn more about Science and Science Fiction! Thanks again!

NASA’s Insight Lander Survives ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ and Successfully lands on the Surface on Mars.

NASA has just scored another success in its long term goal of exploring the planet Mars. The Insight space probe survived its ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ ride through the atmosphere of Mars to a successful landing at about 2:50PM EST or 1950 hours Astronomers Time (GMT) on the 26th November 2018. Unlike NASA’s best known missions to the Martian surface Insight is not a rover vehicle but instead a stationary platform for instruments which it is hoped will discover a great deal about the interior of the red planet.

Insight’s journey to Mars began back on May 5th 2018; see launch image below, and the spacecraft traveled nearly 500 million kilometers to reach its destination. Now Mars hasn’t exactly been easy on the probes we’ve sent to study it, more than half of all missions sent there have ended in failure. One of the big reasons for this is the Martian atmosphere which is too thin to bring a spacecraft to a full stop, the way we use Earth’s atmosphere, yet it is still much thicker than the Moon’s making it difficult to use rockets all the way down.

Launch of the Insight Mars Lander 5 May 2018 (Credit: NASA)

Another reason the scientists and engineers who built Insight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory consider the actual landing to be so nerve wracking is that they have no way of controlling Insight during those dangerous seven minutes. All that the people at Mission Control can do is watch while the spacecraft either performs each of the steps programmed into it at just the right moment, or the whole mission fails.

You see, as the spacecraft enters Mars’ atmosphere the planet is about eight light-minutes distance from Earth. That means that it takes any signal from Insight eight minutes to reach Earth and be received. So if anything does go wrong by the time Mission Control knows about it, and a correction can be sent back to Insight 16 minutes will have passed and the spacecraft will be nothing more than a hole in the Martian surface.

Breakdown of the Insight Probe during its voyage to Mars (Credit: NASA)

The sequence of events actually begins just before Insight hits the atmosphere as the spacecraft’s cruise stage and backshell are discarded. These protected the lander during its voyage from earth while providing it with power, see image above. Entering the atmosphere at about 20,000 kilometers per hour air resistance caused the spacecraft’s heat shield temperature to rise to more than 5,000 degrees Celsius. Once the craft had been slowed to about 1,500 kph a parachute was deployed and the heat shield detached.

At this point the lander’s legs deployed and its onboard radar began to measure the remaining distance to the ground. When the radar measured the distance as 600 meters Insight released its parachute and used 12 small rockets to control its descent the rest of the way.

Artists Illustration of the Landing of Insight (Credit: NASA)

Now remember, because of the time delay in a radio signal traveling from Mars to Earth by the time Mission Control had received the signal that Insight had entered the atmosphere the lander was actually already safely on the ground. Think of that; imagine yourself in Mission Control watching as the telemetry comes in. Everything looks good but your information is eight minutes late. You have no idea if anything went wrong after the signals you’re looking at were sent. You can only hope for the best!

Insight did land safely however, the landing went flawlessly and five minutes after JPL received the signal that the landing was accomplished the probe sent back its first image, see below. The image is covered with dust because of particles kicked up by the landing but you can see the Marian sky at the top along with something of the ground around the lander. Once the protective lens cover was removed the second image is much clearer, also below.

The First Image sent back to Earth by the Insight Lander (Credit: NASA)

Insight’s First Clear Picture (Credit: NASA)

So Insight is on the Martian surface, its solar panels have been deployed to provide it with power, and soon it will be ready to deploy its instruments and begin its scientific mission. See image of lander below.

That mission is to study what goes on beneath the surface of Mars and learn some of the secrets of the Martian interior. The lander’s instruments include a seismograph and a temperature probe that could drill down as far as five meters below the surface. Instruments such as these have before now only been deployed on the Earth and Moon, by the Apollo astronauts.

With the landing of the Insight probe the pace of Mars exploration seems to be gaining momentum, and not just on Mars. Here on Earth people are once again becoming excited by space travel. Whereas just a few years ago a space mission would barely get a mention on the news the Insight landing was covered live by both CNN and FOX. And there’s still more to come. On new years day of 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft, which has already visited Pluto, will pass by the Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule and mid next year astronauts will once again fly into space from America soil.

I’m sure the news media will be covering that!

TESS: NASA’s new Exoplanet Hunting Satellite.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on the 18th of April from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a Space X falcon 9 rocket. Another space success for Space X, which not only delivered TESS to its proper orbit but once again recovered the Falcon 9’s first stage so that can be reused for further missions. The image below shows TESS riding into space aboard a Falcon 9.

Launch of TESS Space Telescope (Credit: Deutsch Welle)

TESS is a replacement for, and an improvement upon NASA’s highly successful Kepler exoplanet hunting space telescope. Kepler’s mission began in 2009 with the spacecraft continuously observing the light output from approximately 150,000 main sequence stars looking for tiny yet periodic dips in the stars light output. Such dips could be caused by one or more planets passing, technically transiting across the face of the star. The image below shows the Kepler Space Telescope and the area of the sky it observes.

As of April 2018 the Kepler Space Telescope had identified 2,650 exoplanets that have been confirmed by closer study with ground-based telescopes. Of the confirmed exoplanets 550 are believed to be rocky Earth type planets with nine of those planets orbiting within their star’s habitable zone.

The years have taken their toll on Kepler however. System failures have greatly reduced the telescopes ability to perform and it will run out of the fuel it needs to keep itself in position within a few months. At the same time a new space telescope, with improved performance that could survey a greater number of stars would lead to even more discoveries of exoplanets. Enter TESS, NASA’s new exoplanet hunting space telescope. The image below shows TESS.

TESS Space Telescope (Credit: Many Worlds)

TESS’s mission is different from Kepler’s in several ways however. For one, whereas Kepler stared continually at a very small patch of the sky, about 0.2% of the entire sky, TESS will be able to observe as much as 85% of the celestial globe. On the other hand, while Kepler studied stars as far away as a thousand light years or a little more, TESS is going to concentrate on the stars closest to our own.

The idea here is for TESS to find a large number of exoplanets that are also close enough to us that we can use other telescopes to not only confirm their existence but to actually learn more about them. In particular it is hoped that the soon to be launched James Webb Space Telescope will even be able to discover something about the chemical composition of the atmosphere of some of the planets that are found by TESS.

TESS will be doing other research as well. The satellite’s instruments will also be able to obtain observations of unexpected, transient events such as the optical components of gamma ray bursts. It is also hoped that the observations made by TESS will advance the study of astroseismology, that is the study of the interior of stars through measuring their surface vibrations.

The projected mission time line for TESS is estimated at 15 years but of course that will depend on the fuel usage. If you’d like to learn more about the TESS Space Telescope and its mission the link below will take you to NASA’s official website for the spacecraft.

https://www.nasa.gov/tess-transiting-exoplanet-survey-satellite

Before I go I’d like to quickly mention another piece of NASA news, the cancellation of the planned Lunar Resource Prospector rover. This mission was intended to land a rover vehicle on the Moon to excavate and study materials on the Lunar surface. The primary material of interest was water ice, which has been observed by orbiting spacecraft in the Moon’s polar regions and which it is hoped could to used to provide fresh water and perhaps even rocket fuel in the near future for any long term settlements on our satellite.

NASA’s decision to cancel the Lunar Prospector makes little sense therefore when you consider President Trump’s recent directive for the Space Agency to return manned missions to the Moon before going on to Mars. The knowledge that the rover could have gained could have been very useful to future lunar explorers. Once again we have a situation where the space agency doesn’t seem to have a firm understanding of exactly what it’s long term goals are, let alone how to achieve them. The image below shows a prototype of the Lunar Prospector rover undergoing test.

Lunar Resource Prospector Prototype (Credit: NASA)

Voyager. The Longest Journey

Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. On September the fifth in 1997 a Titan 3-C rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center carrying a 773 kilo spacecraft that has completely changed the way we see our solar system and even now is exploring the space between the stars themselves. How many things do you know of that are still working after 40 years. The picture below shows Voyager and the various parts of the spacecraft.

The original concept for the Voyager missions was to be a ‘Grand Tour’ of the outer solar system with flybys of four planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Indeed, the Voyager 2 spacecraft did succeed in visiting them all giving us our first close up view of Uranus and Neptune.

The discoveries made by these two robot explorers are too numerous to mention. I can only mention a few: Jupiter’s Rings, volcanoes on Io, the ice covering on Europa, shepherd moons in Saturn’s rings, the dense hydrocarbon atmosphere of Titan, the broken moon Miranda of Uranus and the great black spot on Neptune. Before Voyager all of these places were at best hazy smudges in a telescope, it was Voyage that turned them into worlds for us. The mosaic picture below shows some of the images taken by the Voyager spacecraft.

Mosaic of Voyager Images (Credit: Don Davis, NASA)

Because their mission was planned to take them on a journey so far from the Sun the Voyagers could not be powered by solar cells as most spacecraft are. Instead, each of the two probes carries three Radioisotope-Thermoelectric-Generators (RTGs). RTGs are basically a rod of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that convert the heat into electricity. the three generators combined produced a combined 470 watts of power at launch and even today after 40 years they are still generating about half that amount. That is still enough power to enable the Voyager probes to remain in contact with Earth although most of the probe’s instruments, such as the cameras, have been turned off to conserve power. Only the magnetometer and the low and high energy particle detectors continue to operate, continue to give us information about the space through which Voyager still journeys.

Today Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space, the first object made by mankind to do so. When the Voyagers were launched 40 years ago no one had any idea what the edge of the solar system would be like let alone where it might be. It was Voyager 1 who showed how the solar wind, pushing out from the Sun, comes to a pause known as the heliopause. Beyond that the low energy particles from the Sun disappear while the magnetic field shifts to that of the Milky Way.

Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August of 2012 and Voyager 2 will soon join it. NASA estimates that the power sources on the spacecraft will allow them to remain in contact with Earth until sometime around 2030.

When that contact is lost the long mission of these explorers will finally be over, but only for human beings! You see the scientists and engineers who built Voyager knew that their creation could travel between the stars for thousands if not millions of years and there was the remote but still exciting possibility that one of the Voyagers might someday be found by non-human intelligences.

So the men who built Voyager included a greeting to any aliens that might find it. A golden record was stored away in the Voyager spacecraft. This record contained some of the sounds of Earth, music and greetings, along with images of life on Earth. The cover protecting the record has instructions for playing the record and even a stylus to be used in the playback. It is possible that the messages sent on Voyager may one day be the only record of our ever existing!

In 40,000 years Voyager 1 will pass about 1.6 light years from the star Gliese 445 while at the same time Voyager 2 will pass about 1.7 light years away from the star Ross 248 (both are red dwarf type stars). Even then the Voyagers will continue on and where their journey will end no one can say.

As of this morning Voyager 1 was 20,884,724,316 kilometers from the Sun and getting 16.995 kilometers further every second. Voyager 2 was 17,178,385,861 from the Sun and moving at a velocity of 15.374 kps.

If you’d like to know more about the Voyager spacecraft NASA has two websites. The first deals with the entire voyager mission while the second is for ‘Voyager the Interstellar Mission’. Click on the links below to be taken to those sites.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

Space News for August 2017

There were some interesting news stories related to the exploration of space over the last month reaching from right here on Earth to the very limits of the observable Universe. I’ll start with some news that is both shocking and saddening about the legacy of the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.

In Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio there is the Neil Armstrong Air and Space museum. The museum was built by the State of Ohio as a place to honor Armstrong’s achievements and display for the public some of artifacts and tributes that were bestowed on the astronaut during his career. I’ve been there, it’s a wonderful little museum where you can learn about, or remember as the case may be, the early days of space exploration. I highly recommend it if you’re anywhere near northwestern Ohio.

Now on the night of Friday the 31st of July the museum was broken into and robbed by what authorities believe were three or four men. A number of exhibits were stolen including rare medals and coins but the most valuable item that was taken was a solid gold miniature model of the Lunar Module Eagle presented to Armstrong upon his return to Earth after his Moon landing.

Local police hope to recover the stolen items but right now they have no idea who the burglars were. The scariest thing is that the gold LM model could be melted down for the gold so that no one would ever know what it once was. Anyway it’s a sorry comment on our time that money and greed should in any degree tarnish the legacy of the greatest achievement in human history. The photo below shows Michael Collins’s model of the stolen LM replica.

My second story concerns our picture of the entire observable Universe and how much we’ve learned about it. A new study called the ‘Dark Energy Survey’ (DES) has released some very detailed results of the structure and distribution of matter in the Universe along with how the structure and distribution have changed over the past seven billion years.

The DES team employed a technique called gravitational lensing, a phenomenon first predicted in Einstein’s General Theory where the light from a distant object can be bent by the gravitational field of a closer object. This technique can be used to measure the mass of the closer object by how much it bends the light of the distant object. Using this technique 26 million galaxies, that’s right 26 million galaxies, had their mass measured allowing a map to be made of the mass distribution in a large section of the Universe, see photo below.

Mass Distribution in the Universe (Credit: Chihway Chang, DES Collaboration)

In previous posts (25Sept16 and 3Dec16) I have mentioned the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the leftover heat of the Big Bang which gives us a ‘baby picture’ of our Universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So with the addition of the new DES study we can now test our theoretical models of cosmic evolution. In other words, taking the CMB measurements as the initial conditions do our models give us the kind of Universe we see in the DES?

It turns out that the simplest model; known as Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (λ-CDM) is still an excellent fit. In the model the Dark Energy accelerating the expansion of the Universe is just a constant term (Einstein used the Greek letter λ in his equations) and the Dark Matter we can measure only by its gravity it composed of heavy particles of some kind.

This is a rather strange state of affairs. We don’t know what 95% of the Universe is (Dark Energy, Dark Matter) but when it comes to predicting how it behaves we’re spot on!

Finally, you may have heard that NASA has a job opening for a new Planetary Protection Officer. No, we’re not talking about fighting off the aliens, at least not with a ray gun. NASA has had a Planetary Protection Officer ever since the days of Apollo when there was a very real concern that Lunar microbes might be able to hitch a ride to Earth with our astronauts.

Today most of the Planetary Protection Officer’s job actually deals with protecting other planets, such as making certain that Earth bacteria don’t use one of our Mars Rovers to contaminate the planet before we can discover whether or not life originated there. (Imagine the first astronauts on Mars discover life!!!! Oh wait; it’s just a staphylococcus infection.)

Now if you think Planetary Protection Officer sounds like a fun job, well nine-year-old Jack Davis of New Jersey thought so to. He applied for the job in a hand written note which includes as a qualification “My sister thinks I’m an alien”. Anyway, Jack got a nice reply from NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Doctor James Green telling him to study hard and one day he can work for NASA. Hopefully one day he will.

Space News for May 2017

I guess the big news in space for this month is NASA’s decision that the Exploratory Mission 1 (EM1) will be unmanned as was originally planned. NASA had been asked by President Trump to consider the possibility of adding a crew to the first launch of the long awaited Space Launch System (SLS) along with the Orion spacecraft.

In the end NASA decided to stick to the original mission plan in part because of the added costs in preparing the spacecraft for a crew (Estimated at between 600 and 900 million). Just as importantly however, was NASA’s desire to push the spacecraft to its limits on this first mission, something they did not feel comfortable doing with a live crew. In announcing their decision NASA also stated that the schedule for the EM1 mission will slip into early 2019!

This delay means that the scheduled first manned launch of the SLS/Orion will now take place no earlier that mid 2021 and you can expect that date to slip as well. If you’d like to read NASA’s official announcement click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-affirms-plan-for-first-mission-of-sls-orion

This decision by NASA means that the return of manned launches to Kennedy Space Center will now undoubtedly be by a commercial space company, either Space X’s Dragon capsule of Boeing’s Starliner. Both of these two companies hope to begin manned missions to the International Space Station (ISS) late next year but you can expect one or both to slip into 2019.

Speaking of Space X just a couple of days ago Elon Musk’s company successfully launched the fourth satellite in the Inmarsat series. Inmarsat is a network of satellites built by Boeing to provide broadband connections for aircraft, ships at sea and mobile land users. This was Space X’s second successful launch in as many weeks but the notable fact about this launch was that Space X did not try to recover the rocket’s first stage! The Inmarsat satellite is so massive that the Falcon 9 rocket needed every bit of fuel to put it into orbit leaving nothing left for a recovery.

This says something of the sophistication of Space X’s technology that a mission where they do not recover the rocket is newsworthy.

In other news the Cassini spacecraft has continued to send back breathtaking images of the planet Saturn and it’s rings. Nothing really dramatic has happened to Cassini I just love those pictures!

Also there was a bit of amusing news coming from the ISS as astronauts got to enjoy eating some fresh vegetables courtesy of crew member Peggy Whitson. Astronaut Whitson has harvested the first crop of Chinese Cabbage grown in the microgravity of space. This is the fifth vegetable to be grown aboard the ISS and more are planned in the future.

These first attempts at farming in space may just be experiments to see what is and what isn’t possible but in the long run our ability to produce food on the Moon or Mars or wherever will determine if humanity actually has a future in space.

More Space News for April

Two days ago NASA held a press conference to announce some of the results that scientists have discovered from the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini is in orbit around the planet Saturn and is in the final few months of it’s twenty year long mission.

The press conference mainly dealt with some new discoveries about Saturn’s moon Enceladus which we knew from earlier observations was an ice covered world similar to Jupiter’s moon Europa. For several years now NASA astronomers have speculated that, again like Europa, Enceladus might have a liquid ocean beneath the ice covering, an ocean that could support life.

Now the heat energy that keeps the ocean warm would come from the flexing and squeezing of the moon’s interior caused by the interacting gravitational fields of Saturn and it’s other moon’s, the tidal pulls. The same process is known to cause the numerous volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and are suspected to keep the ocean on Europa warm. The heat generated by this process could also provide the energy for life on Enceladus.

Images taken of Enceladus by Cassini have discovered plumes of water spewing out of the Moon like geysers and now Cassini has even succeeded in flying through those plumes and identifying some of the chemicals contained in them. In their announcement NASA scientists stated that Cassini has detected considerable amounts of both Carbon Dioxide and Methane both of which are commonly associated with living processes. The image below details the processes going on at the moon.

These results give us another possible home for life in our Solar system. Along with Mars and Europa, Enceladus is another world we need to explore further. A specialized mission to search for life on Enceladus may take years to develop and launch however, but someday we’ll know whether or not we have close neighbors living around the ringed planet.

If you’d like to read more about NASA’s announcement click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-missions-provide-new-insights-into-ocean-worlds-in-our-solar-system

There has also been another announcement from NASA concerning grant money being funded to a series of new technology programs. These grants are called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept or NIAC program and are intended to study possible future technologies for spaceflight. The initial Phase I grants are about $125,000 dollars while Phase II grants can be as much as a half a million dollars.

The Phase I grants can be very interesting, even far out concepts while the Phase II grants tend to be a bit more realistic. In the Phase I group are included four completely new type of propulsion technologies, two are intended for interstellar travel, along with a ‘vacuum balloon’ to drift over the surface of Mars and Solar Surfing!

The Phase II grants include a probe of the interior of the planet Venus and a fusion enabled Pluto orbiter and lander. If you’d like to read a bit more about these possible future space technologies click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II

There’s always something new happening in space so I hope you’ll be coming back soon.

NASA at a Crossroads. On to Mars or back to the Moon.

Over the last four presidential administrations NASA’s long term goals for human spaceflight have been pulled back and forth so drastically it almost appears as if we’ve been going backward rather than forward. While Bush#1 wanted to go to Mars, Bill Clinton said let’s build the Space Station that Ronald Reagan called for (at least that actually got done). Then Bush#2 said let’s go back to the Moon while Obama only suggested going to a near Earth asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars.

Now we have a new administration, one who seems to have even less of a plan for space than the ones I’ve just mentioned, so I’m gonna give’em one.

Of course my heart says Mars. I was fourteen years old when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and I can’t accept that we haven’t already gotten to Mars. I desperately hope that we will reach Mars during my lifetime so my heart says Mars!

My head says back to the Moon and here are my reasons why. Next year NASA will launch it’s first Space-Launch-System/Orion capsule mission and there is now talk of making that first mission a manned mission. Now the SLS launch vehicle is really just a modified version of the Ares V rocket that was conceived as a part of Bush#2’s ‘Constellation Program’ for going back to the Moon, and the Orion capsule isn’t even modified as far as I know. So, late next year we could very likely have two of the three major systems for a Moon landing. All we’d need is the lander and if NASA were given the direction and funding that could be accomplished in six years or so. The pictures below show the original Constellation Program ‘Parts’ and the, almost completed SLS-Orion for comparison.

The resemblance is obvious. Again all we need to get back to the Moon is the Altair lander shown below or a similar lander.

To go to Mars however, we would be starting from scratch. The idea of the Orion capsule taking anybody all the way to Mars is ludicrous. Not only doesn’t the combined SLS-Orion have the delta vee necessary for a Hohmann orbit to Mars (that’s the lowest energy required transfer orbit), but there’s no way for three or four astronauts to be stuck inside the small Orion capsule for the more than a year long journey to Mars.

To go to Mars we need a Spaceship, a real one. Maybe not as fancy as the Hermes in the Martian or Discovery in 2001 but still an actual spaceship! And then when we get into Mars orbit we’re going to need a lander to get down to the surface, and even before we send that spaceship everybody always assumes that there will be supplies ‘pre-positioned’ on the surface of Mars awaiting the astronauts. None of this equipment is anywhere past the drawing board, there is absolutely no hardware existing or in the process of construction or even funded. Nothing.

I have a few more reasons for recommending the Moon. As I mentioned above, NASA is studying the concept of pre-positioning equipment and supplies before astronauts land on a planet or satellite. Well we could practice that technique on the Moon a lot more cheaply than trying it on Mars. Indeed, the Moon could be a practice range for landing a big rover, a habitat module, working out regular resupply missions and lot of the techniques needed for a Mars mission could be learned on the Moon.

It’s often been said that the Moon can serve as a stepping stone to Mars and since we’re almost equipped to do that let’s just do it.

The chaotic politics of the last 30 years has resulted in a complete lack of direct in NASA’s goals for human spaceflight. If the current administration were to authorize NASA to build a lander, and provide adequate funding, we could actually accomplish something in just a few years. We could at least get back to where we were when I was a teenager.

I’m not holding my breath!

NASA Selects two new deep space missions to Asteroids. Meet Lucy and Psyche

Two days ago on January the 4th, NASA selected two new missions as a part of their discovery program for the exploration of deep space, away from Earth orbit that is. The new missions are named Lucy and Psyche and will carry out detailed examinations of a range of asteroids not yet studied. To read NASA’s announcement of the missions click the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-two-missions-to-explore-the-early-solar-system

NASA Deep Space Missions. Lucy (Left) and Psyche

Since I’m more interested in the Lucy mission I’ll talk about Psyche first. The Psyche spacecraft will travel to the unusual asteroid 16Psyche. The thing that makes 16Psyche so different, from measurements made here on Earth, is that it has a much higher content of Iron and Nickel than the asteroids we visited so far. In fact it looks a great deal like what we believe the core of our own planet is.

Astronomers have for over a hundred years speculated that the asteroid belt is actually another planet that failed to form because of the gravitational effects of massive Jupiter next door. If so then 16Psyche may be the core of that failed planet and by studying it we may learn something about how planets form as well as something about the core of our Earth.

On the other hand the Lucy mission intends to visit no less than seven different asteroids in the areas of space know as the Jupiter Trojan positions. The Trojan positions have always fascinated me; they are in fact the only stable three body solutions to Newton’s equations of planetary motion Solutions that were discovered by the French mathematician Joseph-Louis LaGrange in his search for a general solution to the “Three Body Problem”.

You see, although when Newton’s laws are applied to a star and a single planet they quickly lead to a nice simple function as a solution, when you add in the gravitational effect of a second planet, a third body, there is in general analytic no solution. After Newton’s death LaGrange and other mathematicians searched for solutions to the three body problem and even today there is work being done on the problem.

So, if there is no general solution how do astronomers calculate when an eclipse will occur, or when a comet will appear in the sky or how did they calculate the trajectory of the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it went past four planets. Well you do it a tiny bit at a time, over and over again.

This was an assignment I had to do in Graduate school. You see, if you know the positions and momentum of the planets today you can calculate what their positions will be, let’s say tomorrow. Then, using Newton’s laws of Gravity, you calculate how their new positions change their momentum. Then you just repeat the whole process over and over again.

This is the sort of calculations that computers are good at, that’s how I did it in Grad school. But back in LaGrange’s day a person had to do all that arithmetic and it would take years! My hat is off to those gentlemen.

Monsieur LaGrange was able to find five particular solutions to the problem (See Picture Below) and these are know as LaGrangian points in his honor. But only two of these positions are stable, L4 and L5 and these have become known as the Trojan positions because Jupiter has acquired a number of asteroids at it’s L4 and L5 positions. Asteroids which have been named for characters in Homer’s Iliad with L4 being the Greek camp and L5 being the Trojan camp.

Getting back to the Lucy mission. Expected to launch in 2021 Lucy will flyby the main asteroid belt member 1981EQ5 in 2025 on it’s way to the Greek camp (L4) where it will encounter four different asteroids in 2027 and 2028. Lucy will then loop back around Earth before headed back to the Trojan camp (L5) for a final encounter with the dual asteroid Patroclus/Menoetius in 2033. This is going to make Lucy one of the longest and certainly most complex missions ever attempted. A lot to look forward to in the years ahead.